By writing a careful paraphrase, you will
clarify for yourself the full meaning of another writer's
statements. In the process of writing a paraphrase, you must pay
close attention to the meaning of the original passage in order to
reproduce that meaning in your own words. Substituting synonyms
for individual words and rearranging the sentence structure will
help you find a new way to express the original meaning.
Paraphrasing not only will help you increase your own
understanding of a particular passage but will allow you to
communicate the meaning of that passage to others. In your own
writing, you will frequently include a paraphrase, particularly
when you need to refer to another writer's work in the course of
making your own original statements. The paraphrase is a skill
useful for both reading accurately, when you want to take precise
notes on what you have read, and for writing, when you want to
reproduce other writer's ideas.

original: Four score and seven years
ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal.

Step One: Use of Synonyms

Eighty-seven years before now, our ancestors
founded in North America a new country, thought of in freedom and
based on the principle that all people are born with the same
rights.

Step Two: Restructuring the
Sentence

Our ancestors thought of freedom when they
founded a new country in North America eighty-seven years ago.
They based their thinking on the principle that all people are
born with the same rights.

Example 2: from V.A. Firsoff, Strange
World of the Moon (1959)

original: The moon is a small world
and the diameter of 2,160 miles gives her a volume equal to 1/49
of the Earth's. Yet whether we explore her vicariously through a
telescope or at some future date directly, it is her surface
rather than her volume that will concern us first and foremost.
This equals about 1/4 of our planet's total superficial area or
approximately 10 million square miles. Moreover, most of the
terrestrial globe is under water, only 57,500,000 square miles
being dry land, while the moon has no seas. Thus she has over 1/6
of the total combined area of our continents, counting Antarctica,
to offer to the explorers who first make a successful landing
among her rather forbidding mountain landscape.

paraphrase: The moon's size is less
than that of most heavenly bodies. The Earth is forty-nine times
the volume of the moon, which measures 2,160 across. But when we
observe the moon either at our current distance through a
telescope or in the future when we land on it, what we notice
first--and are primarily interested in--is the exterior, not the
interior. The surface of the earth is only fourteen times the
roughly ten million square mile surface of the moon. Because less
than half (only 57,500,000 square miles) of the earth's surface is
not covered by seas and oceans, which do not exist on the moon,
the dry surface of the earth, even including Antartica, is less
than six times the dry surface of the moon.

Try the next example on your
own.

Example 3: from Keith Sward, Legend of
Henry Ford (1976)

original: In his first effort as
knight errant, Ford ran up the standard of a militant pacifist.
His debut in world politics began in summer of 1915 when the
European war was entering its second year. His first skirmishes
over new terrain were purely verbal. They took the form of
statements to the press that were studded with passionate
denunciations of war. Most of these bristling manifestos were, in
reality, the work of Theodore Delavigne, a Detroit newspaper
reporter, whom Ford engaged as his pamphleteer and "peace
secretary." Issued in the name of his distinguished patron,
Delaigne's broadsides were all the more newsworthy in that Ford
was swimming upstream. Wall Street had already forged an alliance
with France and Britain. Pro-British sentiment was deep-seated in
America. The advocates of military preparedness were in the
saddle. Against such a combination of social forces, Ford flung
himself headlong.

Step One: Use of Synonyms

Step Two: Restructuring the
Sentence

SUMMARY: THE AUTHOR'S MAIN
IDEAS

A summary will help you understand the major
direction, the main points, and the overall shape of the more
detailed original text. A summary restates the essence of the
original in as few words as possible. In writing a summary, you
focus on the most important statements of the original passage and
eliminate less important material. Producing a summary involves
selection and deletion followed by gathering the main points into
coherent sentences. Like paraphrase, summary can be used for many
purposes: to understand the main points and structure of an
author's argument, to convey that understanding to others, to
present background information quickly, and to refer to another
writer's ideas in the course of your own original
statement.

Example 1: from Richard Deming, Sleep:
Our Unknown Life (1972)

Original (with selected passages
underlined):

Unlike human subjects, animal subjects in
the sleep laboratory obviously cannot be awakened and asked what
they were dreaming. So until relatively recently it was
impossible to state with absolute certainty that any animal
actually dreamed. Then, by a happy accident, experimenters
obtained pretty solid evidence that at least one animal
has dreams.

A team of researchers at the
University of Pittsburgh was attempting to find out if sleep
loss would cause hallucinations (or microsleep dreams, if Dr.
Ralph Berger's theory is correct) in monkeys, as it did in
human beings. The initial procedure was to strap each monkey to a
chair inside what had originally been a telephone booth. A
projection screen was placed directly in front of the
monkey, and colored slides were periodically
shown on it. Each time a slide was projected, the monkey
received an electric shock unless it repeatedly pressed a bar in
front of it.

All the monkeys used in the
experiment quickly learned to avoid the shock by pressing
the bar. They pressed it on an average of fifty times a minute
whenever an image appeared on the screen.

After a monkey had learned its lessons and
had been thoroughly deprived of sleep, the researchers
fitted it with contact lenses that dimmed its vision
without completely blinding it. They left the screen in place, but
projected no more slides onto it. Then they waited for the
monkey to develop hallucinations and start pressing the
bar.

Unfortunately for the purposes of the
experiment, all the animals went to sleep. Each time they
put a different monkey in the converted telephone booth, the same
thing happened. Finally, as the experimenters ruefully watched one
of the monkeys through the viewing window, it passed into deep
sleep, then back up into REM sleep -- and suddenly, in its
sleep, began furiously pressing the
lever.

Obviously the monkey was seeing images in
its sleep, which could only mean that it was
dreaming. Therefore, while the experiment failed in its
initial purpose, it did prove something equally important -- that
at least one animal, the monkey, has dreams during
sleep.

Summary:

Definite evidence of dreams in any animal is
only recent. In an experiment on hallucinations caused by sleep
loss, monkeys had to press a bar to avoid shock when slides, shown
periodically, appeared. Trained in this manner, the monkeys were
deprived of sleep, had their vision dimmed, and were placed before
the screen, but no slides were projected. Although falling into
REM sleep, one monkey repeatedly pressed the bar, apparently
seeing images and, therefore, dreaming.

Try the next example on your
own.

Example 2: from Mort Rosenblum, Coups and
Earthquakes: Reporting the World for America (1979)

Original (please underline main points
you select):

News organizations respond differently when
direct measures are imposed. When former Indian prime minister
Indira Gandhi insisted that Western reporters sign a list of
guidelines for coverage, there were three reactions. Some refused
to sign and left the country in a blaze of integrity; some signed
and respected the restrictions; and others signed and paid no
attention to them. Correspondents who stayed and ignored the
guidelines say they pulled no punches. But some editors who
followed events closely said they detected a slightly tempered
tone.

The imposition of self-censorship can be
more damaging than direct measures. Many authorities will let
correspondents file whatever they want, but they react harshly if
they are unhappy with what is reported. This was called the "File
now, die later" policy in Chile after the 1973 coup. Faced with
undefined threats, reporters may inadvertently withhold sensitive
information by convincing themselves that their perfectly reliable
sources are not good enough. And the more timid deliberately omit
material that might well have gotten by an official
censor.

A number of foreign editors tell their
correspondents to ignore pressures and report frankly. Should they
get thrown out, they will be reassigned somewhere else. But other
editors prefer that their correspondents do not risk getting
thrown out except on the biggest of stories. An expulsion is not
necessarily a badge of honor. Often authorities will not allow
news organizations to replace ejected corespondents. News agencies
can be particularly sensitive if they sell their news and photos
to local papers in the country. AP and UPI policy is to report the
news, whatever the consequences, but local bureau chiefs and
correspondents are sometimes reluctant to jeopardize agency income
by risking having their offices closed down. Regardless of an
organization's policy, correspondents know that if they provoke
the wrath of hard-line rulers, they could suffer a fate worse than
expulsion.